Performing manual, on-site backup and restoration procedures in a communications network has become common practice for many communication and telecommunication providers. One of the major problems that communication providers face when providing service to a large customer base is maintaining good backup procedures related to backing up data stored in network equipment devices. The need for backing up data plays an important role in ensuring that a communications network will be able to recover from various degrees of failure or outages.
In some communications networks, equipment is remotely located on a customer's premises to provide services such as data, voice, video and wireless services functionality. Deploying customer premise equipment on a customers facility allows a carrier to meet the needs of the customer more efficiently. One of the problems associated with locating customer premise equipment remotely from the carrier's facility is an inability to efficiently obtain and maintain backup data from the network equipment.
As a network system continues to grow, its administrators must add network equipment devices to satisfy the additional demand. When a provider continues to add new equipment to the network, such as new customer premise equipment in remote facilities, the need to gather and keep reliable backups of the data stored in the devices increases. Currently, a great amount of manpower is used to perform backup and restoration services to various network components. Performing backup and restorations on customer premise equipment requires timely resources of not only manpower but expensive backup equipment and media as well.
Performing backup and restorations on customer premise equipment has historically required resources beyond not only manpower but expensive backup equipment and media as well. In many cases, technicians must travel to a device of interest and then perform a backup by using a laptop computer or other computing device to locally link to the specific network device to be backed up. If a provider's network is distributed over vast geographic regions, such as across many cities throughout the country (each of which contain a litany of customer premise equipment), the providing backup services becomes an increasingly difficult challenge.
Another issue that providers must address is attempting to communicate with a myriad of different proprietary networking components. Due to the technical complexity of network systems, providers must often combine various network components of differing manufacturers to provide resources that customers desire. Exemplary tasks that are made more difficult by virtue of the mere presence of a large number of devices in a network include tracking, maintaining, and complying with respective procedures that are to be followed to carry out various tasks and routines to extract and restore device data. Not only are the utilities different for each, but the method for extracting the information and data requires considerable time and effort for completing the backup.
Still another illustrative problem with the current state of the art related to performing backups and restores on customer premise equipment is the inability to perform backups on one or more of the network devices. For example, consider a network that includes proprietary equipment that comprises switches, reach-line cards, inter-trunk gateway cards, and a server located at the customers site running from a particular vendor. An illustrative vendor is Nortel Networks Corporation of Brampton, Ontario. Nortel's “OTM software” lacks the ability to backup system-configuration and other data from devices, such as reach-line cards and inter-trunk gateway cards. To extract and perform backups for network devices, a user would physically have to be located at the device and link to the equipment using a laptop computer to manually download the system-configuration data from the particular network device.
Poor maintenance and usage of backup media also presents a problem with backing up data in CPE devices. Dealing with hundreds or thousands of backup devices would require potentially unreasonable recordkeeping to maintain and track the media used to backup data. Technicians are commonly responsible for maintaining a collection of physical, removable backup media in differing forms, such as floppy disks, compact discs, tapes, or other removable storage media.
Problems frequently arise when a technician tries to search or locate specific backup media pertaining to specific customer premise equipment. Searching an archive of differing media among hundreds or thousands of networking components becomes a frustrating and resource-intensive task for the technician. This time-consuming process occasionally results in media being lost, damaged, or inadvertently left unsecure at the equipment. Alternatively, backup media may sometimes need to be mailed to a designated location, thereby further exposing the data to potentially harmful handling and more. This adds additional confusion when trying to locate or retrieve a backup incident to the failure of a piece of equipment.
Facilitating backups of hundreds or thousands of customer premise components located and distributed throughout a country or city present significant logistical problems to companies. Therefore, a need exists for a backup utility application that can perform remote backup and restoration functions on a multitude of network components. The current state of the art could be improved by automating the backup functions and routines for all local and remote network devices using a designated software application that would be responsible for scheduling and maintaining data archives at one central facility. A need further exists for the ability to perform specific routines and procedures for each of a set of proprietary components and thereby allowing data to be retrieved and stored in one or more central location(s). A need also exists for utilizing system redundancy of the backup application to improve reliability of all the backed up information. Additionally, a further need exists to provide an application that manages and maintains backups for all the backup components (which consequently would reduce the frustration, costs, and time associated with performing on site, manual data backups). Lastly, the current state of the art could be improved by providing accountability and identification of backup files and data that is easy to obtain, readily accessible in a central storage location, and not dependent on static, removable-storage-medium devices.